


President Euphrosynia

by phoenixyfriend



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-08-09 08:45:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16446605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixyfriend/pseuds/phoenixyfriend
Summary: It's a long and twisted and very odd road, from dead Heterodyne Princess to upper-class modern infant to President of the United States.Euphrosynia didn'texpectto be here, but she was a Spark. A Heterodyne. Even stripped of both of those, she's clever and stubborn and charming as anything. If the world doesn't suit her, she will force it to bend until it does.Really. What else were people expecting the product of centuries of mad conquerors to do?(Well. Itwastrue that they didn't know that part.)





	1. The Original Syn

**Author's Note:**

> This is another fic that gets blamed on Discord.

Her new name is Cynthia Fitzgerald.

It is not a name that strikes fear into the hearts of men.

(Yet.)

Euphrosynia died, disappeared into the ether, in Van Rijn’s laboratory, snooping about in things she shouldn’t have been.

She wakes up an infant in a new world.

They speak English here, she thinks. It’s not the English she knows, studied from vellum books written in pretty scripts by clever hands, imported by her father with hundreds of others in half a dozen languages to ensure that, son or daughter, all his children would be true Heterodynes. There are accents to their voices that she doesn’t recognize, words she’s never heard, and structures she needs to hear dozens of times over to even begin to parse.

(Euphrosynia had spoken a baker’s dozen of tongues, by the time she’d arranged for the marriage to Andronicus. She was as clever and as learned as any of her line, and beautiful to boot.)

She’s clever, though, and far more than the infant she seems. She picks it all up rather quickly.

Cynthia Fitzgerald is the second child. There will be two more to follow her.

Her older brother, and she _has_ one again, is not much like Blüdtharst. James likes the rules, for the most part, and he’s not _nearly_ as clever as Blüdtharst had been. That’s disappointing, but not surprising, she thinks. Few can compare to Heterodynes, and nobody in this family is a spark at all. He’s four years older than her, just old enough that he wants to hold her as an infant, help her walk as a toddler, and ‘teach’ her things as she gets older.

He’s not as clever as Blüdtharst, no, but he’s kind, and he loves her. She grows fond of him. She grows possessive.

Her parents, in this life, are not around very much. Her new father, she gathers, is some form of businessman. He’s not a merchant, but Syn hasn’t been able to access the books that might tell her what ‘stocks’ are, and she’s too young for anyone to actually explain it to her when she asks. She’s fairly certain that he’s not in the business of building restraining devices for public punishment and humiliation. She remembers the word being one with dozens of meanings, and some _did_ have to do with money.

Her mother is beautiful, and proud, and does something that involves leaving at early hours and coming home smelling like odd chemicals.

Their quality of life is good. It’s not what she’d had as a Heterodyne. The house is smaller. The food is different. The walls do not speak, and there are no minions to order about.

But she has a nanny. There are maids. Even her disinterested mother takes time to dress her up in new, strange clothes every few weeks.

It’s not a terrible life. It is dreadfully boring, save for her brother.

“I want to learn science,” she tells him, at age three. “And maths. And languages. I want to learn everything.”

“Your mother would disapprove,” the nanny says. She doesn’t seem terribly bothered. “I’m sure I can find something child-appropriate…”

“Why wouldn’t Mommy like it?” James asks.

The nanny’s smile grows strained. Her name, Euphrosynia remembers, is Marie. “Don’t worry about that, Jamie. Just don’t tell your mother. Come along, Cynthia. It’s time for your nap.”

Euphrosynia hates it, but she listens. She remembers Blüdtharst’s first son. Naps were important for small children. She’s stubborn, but she’s not actually a child. She naps.

James asks their mother that night. More specifically, he says, “Mommy, can we go to the bookstore to find baby books about science? Cynthia wants to learn.”

Their mother wrinkles her nose. “She’s three.”

“I want to learn,” Euphrosynia says. “I like reading.”

“Wouldn’t you like something else?” Their mother tries. “How about some dolls?”

“I want to learn about science.”

“It’s not _normal_ for a little girl to read books,” their mother says. “Haven’t you seen Abby? Her dolls have the cutest dresses!”

“I want books,” Euphrosynia reiterates. She’s getting annoyed. Why is this so hard to understand? “I want to learn.”

“Cynthia, hun,” her father says. He sounds pitying. “Girls just aren’t usually very good at math or science or anything like that.”

Euphrosynia feels her jaw drop, staring at him in outrage even as he continues.

“Maybe we could get you some Barbie movies,” he says instead, like this is in any way an acceptable substitute.

“I want _science!_ ” Euphrosynia insists. “If you get me dolls, I’ll just take them apart and make something new!”

“Bed,” her father says, hand coming down on the table. He fixes her with a hard stare. “No dessert.”

Euphrosynia shoves away from the table and stomps to her room.

Not good at math?

 _Girls_ aren’t good at math?

She’s a Heterodyne!

She’s a Spark!

She’s _going to show them all._


	2. The Naming of Syns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Euphrosynia grows up, just a tiny bit, and tries to put her foot down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: narcissistic mom, neurodivergence-related ableism, and the misogynistic attitudes towards STEM fields that are probably going to be here for most of the fic

Marie lets them watch shows about science.

They’re not particularly advanced shows, as they’re meant for children with no solid basis in anything Euphrosynia considers herself an expert in, but they’re nice. They’re _cute_. They explain things in a way that Jamie understands, and Euphrosynia gets to sit back and make sure that everything she knows in _this_ life matches up to everything she knew in the last.

(As she gets older, she learns that there are things that don’t match up at all.)

(Lots of things.)

Jamie is on her side. She begs him not to tell their parents, and he agrees, because she’s small and cute and his little sister, and she’d cried after their father had said girls couldn’t do math or science.

(She blamed the toddler hormones. She’d grow out of it. Eventually.)

He watches with her, sitting together on the couch. There’s Cyberchase, and The Magic School Bus, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. They’re not allowed to watch a _lot_ , because television is Bad For Kids or something, but Euphrosynia gets to watch about science and Jamie likes to watch with her, and sometimes if Marie is tired or has a headache and can’t take them to the park, she’ll let them watch Discovery Kids on low volume, and draw on printer paper.

Euphrosynia draws things she remembers that’ll let her practice her fine motor skills without alarming her parents.

She draws princesses in lovely dresses.

(She remembers spilling an entire glass of wine on that dress, when the Princess of Blenshaf had made a comment on Euphrosynia’s hair in what she _thought_ was a voice too low for Euphrosynia herself to hear.)

She draws handsome princes in majestic poses.

(She’d had many issues with Andronicus, not the least of which was that marrying him meant betraying oh so many other people, but she had, in her own way, loved him. That much, she could admit to herself.)

She draws animals, from real to imaginary to long-extinct.

(Something in her is very upset that mammoths are long-dead here. She’d _liked_ her war mammoths!)

Her mother cheers up at the art, takes her to see princess movies and get pretty dresses of her own.

Euphrosynia doesn’t even dislike pretty dresses. She just wants pants, too. Something that lets her run and climb and fight and do science and any number of lovely things she can’t really do in a fluffy dress without ruining it.

When she’s three-and-a-half, her mother is pregnant again.

Euphrosynia whines her way into coming along to the obstetrician visits, and asks endless questions about the ultrasound and her little siblings. The doctor humors her, and her mother’s smile is fixed, and Euphrosynia is _learning_.

(Euphrosynia learns a lot anyway, but most of it is environmental. It’s in the version of Romanian that her mother softly sings as she does Euphrosynia’s hair, and the French her father speaks on the phone with his own mother. It’s in the fact that this version of English sits clumsily on her tongue for ages until she adjusts to the changes in sound and structure. It’s in the television, the cell phone, the many sleek and gleaming kitchen appliances that make it obvious just how _normal_ these things are in this world. It’s in the snatches of news that she sees on the television in the early mornings as her father watches during breakfast with a frown on his face, in the stories that make it to the big screen, in the fact that she has not once heard of sparks in a way that makes them seem real.)

(Euphrosynia learns a lot, but it’s never fast enough.)

Her mother is home more, after that. Marie still takes care of Euphrosynia and Jamie, but the shows are gone. When the TV is on, it’s princess shows, or the medical drama her mother stars in. Sometimes it’s Toddlers and Tiaras, and the one time her mother gets a gleam in her eye and suggests Euphrosynia try it, even idly, Euphrosynia throws a tantrum.

She’s not proud of the tantrum, but she’s also not about to enter a _child beauty pageant._

“I don’t get it,” Jamie says to her once, as he watches her tie her shoes. She knows how, of course, but her fingers are still too short and stubby to do it easily, so Jamie has to wait for her. “You said you like pretty dresses sometimes. Why do you start crying when Mom says you should wear them more?”

“Because she thinks I should wear dresses so that I stop wearing pants,” Euphrosynia says. She finishes with her shoes and crosses her arms, pouting up at him. “And so that I stop wanting to do science, and so I stop wanting to fight the boys on the playground.”

“You got hurt when you did that.”

“It was worth it,” Euphrosynia insists, and then lets him pull her to her feet. “I like dresses, but Mom doesn’t think I can like dresses _and_ all the other stuff I like, because she thinks all the other stuff is just for boys. Plus, they’re always itchy at my waist. I don’t like that.”

“Okay,” Jamie says, and takes her hand so they can meet Marie at the front door.

They play at the park for hours. Marie spends most of her time sitting on a bench and watching them, and the Waltman kids are there, so Euphrosynia gets to talk a bunch of people into all playing a game of Save the Princess.

Jenny Waltmann is the princess, of course.

Euphrosynia is the dragon.

o.o.o.o.o

Aunt Ilse is pregnant, too. She’s practically glowing, the way happy and healthy pregnant people tend to be, and she comes over to talk a lot with Euphrosynia’s mother.

“Hello, little Cyn!” she coos, when Euphrosynia gets called over by her mother to put her hands on their swelling stomachs and feel for kicks. “You’re getting big!”

Euphrosynia smiles and pretends she doesn’t hate being babytalked.

“Cyn?” Her mother asks, nose wrinkling in distaste.

“I like it!” Euphrosynia declares.

Cyn.

No.

Syn.

She can work with that. She _likes_ that.

“I wanna be called Syn,” she insists, putting her hands on her mother’s knee and using it to push herself higher as she jumps up and down. “It’s cute!”

“Cynthia,” her mother says, with a clenched jaw and another one of those tight smiles. “It sounds like we’re calling you a sin. Like in the Bible, remember?”

Syn blinks at her. “So?”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to think that unless you bring it up first,” Aunt Ilse says.

“I still don’t like it,” Syn’s mother says.

“I wanna be Syn!”

It is not the last fight they have on the subject.

o.o.o.o.o

There are no Sparks in this world, but there are other things, disorders, that come close.

Euphrosynia is easily distracted. She is easily invested. She will work on ten things in the span of five minutes, or one thing for hours with such intensity that she does not notice the passage of time, not to eat or drink or sleep. When Jamie asks her about something she cares about, she talks and talks and talks, until she’s said so much that he doesn’t understand a word of it anymore, but she’s so excited to share that she can barely hold herself back.

There are tastes in this new world that are strange and foreign and fun, and some that are strange and foreign and _painful_ , or of such a texture that Syn can’t stand them. She can’t Heterodyne to block out the sounds that grate against her senses, and even something as simple as the sizing tag on her clothing makes her feel like she needs to scratch herself out of her skin. She’s stubborn, and has such trouble relating to people other than Marie and Jamie that she’s pretty sure it’s not just the new world and being not-quite-four.

Her father takes note, but doesn’t seem to care. He thinks she’s a troublemaker.

Her mother takes note, and approves of some of it. She thinks Syn is _delicate_.

Marie takes note, and worries.

The preschool notices, and _suggests_ to the Fitzgerald parents that their daughter may benefit from seeing a child psychologist. One of a specific list, even.

It leads to a number of different professionals running a number of different tests on a number of different occasions. It leads to a lot of nose-wrinkling on the part of her mother and deep frowns on the part of her father. It leads to a diagnosis.

“Autistic Spectrum Disorder” was not something that had existed as a classification in the Europa that Euphrosynia had known.

After her parents find out, after Jamie and Marie and everyone who needs to know _knows_ , Syn goes to research what she can find out for herself. It’s a developmental disorder, and it’s related to something called ADHD, to the point where some people think they can’t both be present in one person. She looks up ADHD, too, after the list of things about autism, and then thinks about the things that had been present in so many of the Sparks she’d known in her life, from family to friends to enemies to rivals.

She thinks that, had the Spark existed in this strange new world, it would have been considered part of this same family of disorders.

Syn doesn’t want to think about it beyond that. She wants to continue with her life, grow up, do some science, and be amazing. If this diagnosis means her parents will _listen_ when she says she can’t eat or do something, then that’s a good thing, right?

It doesn’t work like that.

Her mother bemoans that she must have done something wrong for her daughter to be _broken_ like this.

(Euphrosynia is not broken, and while her mother had done plenty of things wrong in her role as family, none of them were the cause of this situation.)

Her father does not change his attitude, but often pretends that it was a lie by the doctors to take their money, and that Euphrosynia better not use it as an excuse to get out of doing things properly.

(He doesn’t say it like that, because, by the time the diagnoses are finished, Euphrosynia is still only just barely four years old, and it’s hard to present a message like that to a child. Euphrosynia can read between the words, though.)

Jamie tries to treat her different, but then she gets upset enough by it that he stops.

Marie just does her job. Marie, Syn thinks, is unsurprised.

Life goes on, and then the twins are born.

Syn is a big sister, now. She’s never had that before. It’s going to be fun, she thinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The frequency with which girls are actually diagnosed with autism is... much lower than the actual presence of autism in women, due to how many of the symptoms get dismissed for reasons relating to misogyny and societal expectations of young girls. Women and girls are underdiagnosed. I haven't seen any studies showing how this effects transmasculine folk, but I imagine a similar issue is present regarding difficulty of diagnosis.
> 
> I am... probably autistic, in that I fit many of the criteria for how autism presents in women, have had autistic friends tell me that they pegged me as such the day they met me and then I continued to confirm that assumption for several years, and in general have just done enough of my own research to know that I'm probably somewhere on the spectrum. Due to the aforementioned tendency in the field to mis- or underdiagnose women when it comes to autism, however, I do not have a diagnosis, and likely won't for some time, if ever.


	3. The Education of Syns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Euphrosynia doesn't really... _fit_ into normal schools correctly. There are other options.

She gets to hold babies.

She hadn’t really gotten a chance to do that much, before. Once or twice, one of the servants had brought her baby in when Euphrosynia had shown interest, or she’d been asked to revive an infant that had died of unknown causes, but for the most part, Euphrosynia just hadn’t had a chance to really interact with children much.

Cynthia Fitzgerald, on the other hand, has little siblings and a little cousin and a mother who is very eager to show her how to Properly Engage with Womanly Activities.

(Ugh.)

Harrison and Verity. Twins. A month and a half later, Aunt Ilse gives birth, too.

“Hello,” Syn says, carefully balancing her little sister on her lap. Her father was next to her, hand out carefully to make sure Verity didn’t get dropped. “I’m your sister. I’m Syn.”

There are lots of things she wants to say. There are a lot of languages she wants to say them in. She doesn’t, though. Her parents are here, and they’ll _think_ things if she does that.

She limits herself to simply, “I’m going to take care of you.”

She means it, too.

(Two months later, her mother takes all four children over to Aunt Ilse’s to meet the new baby. His name is Remy. Much like Harrison and Verity, he is very small, and very red. He is slightly less prone to crying.)

o.o.o.o.o

Babies are boring.

This is something that Syn realizes over the course of months, though she’s in denial at first. It’s really months and months, too, until they become toddlers and she can start showing them how to stuff shapes into matching holes, or how to piles blocks, or whatever it is that toddlers learn how to do from their almost-five-year-old sisters.

Syn loves them, though. Little siblings! She’s never had that before! They’re small and cute and _completely_ unable to take care of themselves, and Syn would love to build some big old clanks to keep them safe, but she’s learned enough about this new world to know that it doesn’t work like that anymore. Things won’t work and fit just because she wills them to, and it takes time, takes _ages_ , to experiment on something enough to actually be sure that it’s going to work once it’s turned on.

She’s also fairly certain she’d get in far more trouble here than in her first life. Irritating her parents is fun, of course, but after a certain point it simply isn’t _worth_ it.

They send her to kindergarten.

Then they have her take some very boring tests, and then suddenly she’s being asked if she wants to be in a higher grade.

She accepts immediately, of course.

It takes a few more tests for them to decide which one, and d some worried, whispered arguing on the part of, well, pretty much everyone. Syn knows they’re worried that if they place her too high, she will be at a social disadvantage. She already _is_ , given the diagnosis from a year ago, but placing her in a situation where she’s so much younger than her peers is only going to make things worse.

Syn can’t say that she’s not very interested in making friends her own age. This is partly because she doesn’t _mind_ some of the games with other five-year-olds, the ones that involve running around and yelling and occasionally trying to hit each other with sticks. It’s mostly because it will irritate her parents far more than she’s willing to deal with. Her mother will begin to bemoan her strangeness, and her father will lecture on how important it is for her to learn to build connections, _especially_ with such a disability, and Syn is very much not in the mood to deal with that shit.

So Syn just stays quiet and lets the “adults” argue over what’s best for her, and daydreams about university.

(Someone suggests boarding school, and Syn flips out. She doesn’t want to be sent away from her siblings. She likes them. She arguably even likes her home. She likes Marie and Aunt Ilse and Uncle Jack. She’d only be happy about leaving her parents, really, but that’s outweighed by how much she _doesn’t_ want to leave the rest of them.)

(She’s a Heterodyne. Family is important. Loyalty is important. Filial piety is important, even if she hadn’t really known the term before.)

They find a solution.

The problem is that Syn is too clever by half. She’s already getting bored in classes, the newness of some of the information being nowhere near enough to outweigh the sheer speed with which she consumes, processes, and is ready for more. If she were just autistic and clever, if she were _just_ Cynthia, then skipping a grade might have been enough.

But she is Euphrosynia. She is a grown woman, a Spark, a genius of decades. It shows, and they worry about how to place her.

But a solution exists, mostly.

There’s a schooling style. Montessori. Euphrosynia reads up on it, later. They put children together in larger age groups than just a year, and learning is often self-directed, and they work on things for larger blocks of time, and so on. It’s not a perfect solution, not at all, but it is a _good_ one. It’s close enough for Euphrosynia to just hop in the car and get driven there and back every day. It’s better-suited for a child like herself, even if she feels they’ll still be accelerating her a little.

So Syn transfers schools.

o.o.o.o.o

She has acquaintances. Not friends, not really, though they get along well enough. She can gain fondness for these children, but it’s hard to feel a connection of that sort with someone so much younger, so much less experienced, so much more _innocent._ They really are children, and Syn isn’t.

Still, she gets to talk to them, and to the teachers, and work on those ‘people skills’ that she keeps being told she’s lacking. She gets to do science so long as someone is watching. She joins an elementary school robotics club, learning the basics of programming and trying not to show how much her hands itch with the desire to do _more_. She knows the teachers just don’t want her to run before she can walk, but she’s been walking for such a very long time, and she just wants to sprint off to the next beautiful, _wonderful_ advancement and take it apart to see how it works. Robots! Programming! Clanks like this were never Syn’s style, not really, but _goodness_ they’re amazing.

Her parents frown and titter, and she hears them talking late at night about what’s _wrong_ with her, but they learn to adjust to having a child that’s strange and off-kilter and smarter than anyone is ready to admit. They don’t adjust _happily_ , she thinks, but they adjust. They learn to deal with it.

Jamie’s still in her corner. Marie is _allowed_ to let her watch the science shows, now, a few months after Euphrosynia’s genius gets noted, and her weekends have snatches of those, when she isn’t going to the park or whatever sporty thing is being suggested. Her mom is trying to get her into ballet. It’s only sort of working.

(Syn reads an article on how easy it is for ballerinas to break femurs with their kicks. It’s kind of amazing.)

Harrison and Verity and Remy all grow up at astounding rates. Syn doesn’t see Remy as much, so she’s always more surprised to find out he’s a few pounds heavier and a few inches longer. It’s weird. Babies are _weird_.

Entire years pass this way.

Jamie starts playing soccer. The twins start pre-school. Everyone starts seeing Marie less, though she’s still _around_ quite a lot. Syn doesn’t need help with her homework, but she still sits at the table with everyone else.

Her mom gets her some books, one winter holiday. They come with a doll. _American Girl_ , the packaging says. Syn doesn’t expect much. Syn is… surprised by the contents.

It’s not a very advanced book. She’s fairly certain it’s meant for a year or two above whatever she’s meant to be reading right now. But the contents are… they’re _something_. She speeds through the first book, gets a story about a young girl in a historical setting who talks about real, actual issues like women’s suffrage and child labor and… and…

She goes to her mother and asks, “Why did you get me these?”

Her mother freezes, and tries not to look like the words hurt. “I thought you might like them. Why, do you not?”

Syn eyes her. The relationship she has with her mother is weird. It always has been. She’s pretty sure it always will be. She’s six, now, and their relationship is still characterized by screaming fits about dresses and pants and just how much time Syn should be spending on books or fighting instead of, well, something appropriately girly that will ‘make it easier for her to function in the adult world without struggling with people thinking she’s too much of a tomboy, or wanting to tear her down for her appearance, or trying to take advantage of her social ineptitude to marry her for the money.”

(These are not words that her mother has said to her _face_ , but they are certainly words that her mother has _said_.)

(There are other things to her mother’s choices, of course. There’s a deep and abiding fear of how Syn being strange will reflect on her mother and her career. Gossip from the neighbors. Catty comments from her mother’s friends. Her _grandmother_. There are many far more selfish reasons to her mother’s actions.)

(But there’s a fear _for_ Syn there, too, and she can… somewhat appreciate that. She still can’t wait to be an adult again and get out, but she can acknowledge that there are genuinely a few parental instincts in there.)

Syn thinks she cares for her mother, but there is… not love. Not really. Tolerance, maybe.

“I liked them a lot,” Syn finally says. She clasps her hands behind her back and looks up at her mother. “Can I have more?”

Her mother smiles, an uncertainty behind her eyes that Syn doesn’t know she’d have seen if she hadn’t spent so very many years following her father to meddle with the nobility whenever boredom struck.

“Sure, honey. I’ll see what I can do.”

o.o.o.o.o

Cynthia Fitzgerald isn’t old enough to babysit. Euphrosynia is, but her body isn’t old enough to take care of someone smaller than her yet.

There’s bits of responsibility, though. Marie brings her and Jamie and the twins over to Aunt Ilse’s more, now that Syn’s mother is working again. The women tell Syn and Jamie to come get them if someone starts crying, and then sit together at the kitchen table and drink coffee and chat. The bottom floor of the house is ‘open-plan,’ which means that they can just crane their heads to see from the kitchen table into the living room if they get worried, and Jamie’s _ten_ now, and Syn is seven, and they’re more or less old enough for Marie and Aunt Ilse to trust them with yelling for help if they need it.

Ilse calls her over, once, and sits her on a chair, and carefully tells her that Remy is three now, and has the same thing Syn has. He’s on the spectrum, just like she is, and it’s going to manifest differently, but that Ilse would very much appreciate it if Syn can be a role model for Remy and help Ilse understand what’s going wrong when Remy’s upset and Ilse can’t figure it out.

 _A baby spark_ , is Syn’s first thought. She lets go of it quickly enough, because sparks aren’t really a _thing_ here, but she can already feel a new form of protectiveness forming around her little cousin. He’s not just family, he’s _like her_.

It means a lot.

“Of course!” she says, because if Ilse wants her help with a little cousin that’s _like her_ , then she’s absolutely going to help. Even if it just means being a friend.

Ilse starts to thank her, but then there’s a muffled thud, and Jamie yells that Verity just pulled on the tablecloth on the long foyer table and knocked over Aunt Ilse’s Shabbat candle holders. Then Ilse’s running off to handle that because the carpet _probably_ means nothing is broken, but if Verity figured out how to reach something that high, then it _probably_ also means that it needs to be moved for the safety of every small child in the house.

Syn almost follows, but Marie puts her hand on Syn’s shoulder. Syn pauses, and looks back at Marie.

Marie smiles, soft and proud and maybe a little sad, and pulls Syn into a hug against her side. It’s soft and warm and when Syn wraps her arms around Marie and squeezes, Marie squeezes her right back, just how she loves it. Pressure hugs are the best.

“I’m proud of you, kiddo. You know that, right?”

She does, but it’s still nice to hear.

“Thanks, Marie.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Parents are only human. Syn's mom is trying, but she's also... well. She's got a lot of "narcissist mom" in her and it's not exactly offset by only occasional attempts at actually understanding her kids. She's also not pure evil.


	4. The Aging Montage of Syns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody grows up eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiny baby chapter before I head off to work! I have another section planned for hopefully later tonight.

By the time Syn is nine, she’s in a half dozen different extracurriculars, most of which have her parents pursing their lips and… well, they go along with it, but they aren’t really _happy_ about it.

Robotics club, chemistry club, debate club, martial arts outside of school, gymnastics, and… horseback riding.

(They approve of the last two, at least.)

Getting her homework done as fast as possible means that she has the time, for now, to actually _do_ all of these without feeling overwhelmed. Being a reincarnated Heterodyne has more than a few perks.

o.o.o.o.o

When Syn is ten, she starts getting trusted with watching her little siblings and cousins more. Jamie’s doing more extracurriculars, now, mostly soccer, and their mom just got a secondary role on some big movie that’s coming up, so she isn’t home much either. Marie can handle four kids, really! But sometimes she needs to drive Jamie to practice, or the twins have one of their afterschool clubs, or it’s her day off and the kids are all at Aunt Ilse and Uncle Jack’s house, or… well, everyone’s growing up a little, and needs to be in more places.

So it’s not for very _long_ , but Syn gets to watch the little siblings and cousins, now. Aunt Ilse’s even having another baby! Jamie thinks the age gap is weird, but Syn had seen much wider gaps, before.

(The aristocracy was strange, for all that she’d _technically_ been a part of it.)

She’d sworn, once, in front of Remy and Verity and Harrison. Marie had heard, and she’d gotten scolded for it.

After that, Syn starts swearing in languages she’d known before. The Mechanicsburg dialect doesn’t _exist_ here, and even if it had, she speaks a version that’s over three centuries out of date, and often relies on references to things that have never been invented.

o.o.o.o.o

When Syn is eleven, she gets three days of out-of-school suspension for breaking someone’s nose.

She doesn’t regret it.

Remy _just_ got transferred in, after all. If someone was going to pick on him, they were going to deal with her throwing hands. He was too mousy for a fight, especially with kids two years older than him. Syn, on the other hand, has been doing martial arts for a few years, and remembers being one of possible heirs to an empire built on war. If Remy couldn’t protect himself, and he _can't_ , then Syn is going to do it for him.

That’s how family _works_.

o.o.o.o.o

When Syn is twelve, the school starts setting her and a few other students up with a specialized tutor for higher-level subjects that the rest of the school isn’t ready for. There’s talk of early graduation, squeezing in all of high school so that she’s done by age fifteen at the latest.

Syn thinks she might miss some of her classmates, but that’s what the internet is for. It’s always growing, always changing, always moving in new directions with lots of information to access and a little thing called ‘Wikipedia’ and Syn’s seen MySpace getting enough attention that she sets up an account, if only a basic one, in hopes that it’ll let her stay in contact with some of her school friends.

(There’s a new one, Facebook? It’s growing. It’s growing fast. Syn gets an account there, too, and keeps an eye out.)


	5. Sins and Rhymes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Careful, Syn, your Heterodyne is showing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for: a slur relating to autism (in a description a past incident)

Syn gets to babysit Remy one day, when Aunt Ilse is taking baby Hannah out for a doctor’s appointment, and Marie’s taken the twins out to do… something? Syn hadn’t really been paying attention. It might have just been for a playdate.

In any case, Syn and Remy are sitting together on the floor, playing chess, because Remy seems to really enjoy it, and Syn’s good enough to give him a challenge, which is more than most of the adults can say at this point. Syn has a bit of a leg up over them in the first place, of course, but it’s still funny to see her father lose to Remy without _letting_ Remy win, and then watch as Remy and Syn play endlessly without either party really getting the higher ground without fighting for it.

(It’s _hilarious_ , actually. Syn treasures that look. She can tolerate her mother, even feels some fondness for the woman, but her father is… well.)

Remy takes one of her knights, and Syn swears. It’s one of the ones she’d heard Blüdtharst use a few times, not too strong, but plenty creative.

Remy blinks at her. Syn pouts and takes a sip of one of the juice packs that Ilse had left for them.

 _“So should I dance around the subject, or simply assume that you are Princess Euphrosynia?_ ”

(Perfect late 1600s Mechanicsburg Romanian, even if there _is_ something of an accent.)

This is how Syn finds out that she is still capable of experiencing shock strong enough for a spit take.

Remy’s face is scrunched up, eyes screwed tight behind his glasses. He’s covered in juice, so that’s… fair.

 _“What?”_ She demands.

“Syn, I am _covered in juice_ ,” Remy grinds out, back to English. He’s young enough that it sounds more like whining. His eyes are still shut. “Can we talk it out after I’m _not?_ ”

She hesitates, and then gets to her feet and runs for some paper towels.

Syn’s wiping Remy’s face dry before it occurs to her that if he’s like her, but not from Mechanicsburg, then he might not actually _like_ her very much. He might not want her doing this…

But she’s already been doing it for six years, so maybe it’s not that big of a deal.

“What?” Remy asks, clearly having noticed the long pause. He’s squinting at her without his glasses.

“Nothing,” she says, and continues wiping him down. “You should change your shirt, probably.”

Remy gives her a glare, but gets up and heads for the stairs. “We’re talking when I get back!”

“As soon as you’re not sticky!” Syn yells after him.

She recognizes, at that point, that she should probably clean up.

She doesn’t want to clean up, she wants to figure out _what the hell just happened_.

She cleans up anyway, grabs a wet paper towel and cleans up the juice spray that’s all over the chess board, the pieces, and the table. She’s about to start on the floor when Remy comes back, takes a seat at the kitchen table instead, and crosses his arms. He’s still glaring at her.

“You could have waited until I wasn’t drinking,” Syn tells him, in lieu of anything better.

“The Euphrosynia I met wouldn’t have sprayed juice everywhere,” Remy grumbles. “Or wiped my face afterwards, for that matter.”

Syn shrugs. “Depends on who you were, really. You speak Romanian like you were from way further North than Mechanicsburg, though, so I probably would have just laughed at you.”

“You… haven’t figured out who I am,” Remy says. His brow is furrowed, and he looks a little like she’s a puzzle he can’t figure out. “You don’t… _my first name is the same!”_

“I don’t think I knew a Rembrandt,” Syn points out. She frowns, thinks back, and… “Nope. No Rembrandts.”

He stares at her. “There was someone _in this world_ with my _entire name._ In _our century._ ”

Syn’s frown deepens. “I know there was a Rembrandt in art history, but…”

“ _Van Rijn_ ,” Remy finally snaps. He switches to very angry 1600s French. “ _Rembrandt van Rijn! Why is this so hard for you to remember?!”_

Syn blinks at him, and then, “ _Oh yes! Andronicus’s pet wizard.”_

Remy lets his face fall into his hands. He stays like that for… a while.

 _“So… you were the one that built the Muses,_ ” Syn says. She might as well think out loud, and in her _own language_ , now, if he’s going to be like this. “ _They were quite pretty, though Andronicus did find them rather… frustrating._ ”

 _“I’m aware_ ,” Remy says flatly, picking his head up to glare at her again. _“Why are you taking this so well?”_

Syn tilts her head. _“I spit juice all over you.”_

Remy rolls his eyes. _“I half expected you to try to kill me once I told you._ ”

 _“You need a better sense of self-preservation_ ,” Syn tells him.

 _“Says the woman who disappeared as a direct result of digging around my laboratory_ ,” Remy shoots back.

Syn shrugs. _“Daddy asked me to.”_

 _“Right, because you always listen to your parents._ ”

Syn frowns, at that. _“Clemethious was a much better father than my current one. An absolutely terrible person, by contemporary ethical standards, but as a father? Much better. What he wanted me to do was in favor of the family’s and Mechanicsburg’s future fortunes. Of course I did it. I’m a Heterodyne. My duty is… my duty_ was _to Mechanicsburg.”_

Remy’s fingers tap along the table, and he eyes her through those large, unwieldy glasses. He’s eight. Goodness. Her little cousin is Van Rijn. _Was_ Van Rijn. _“See, this is why I only_ half _expected you to try to kill me.”_

Syn waits. She’s not going to ask.

Remy rolls his eyes again. _“You care far too much about family, and about me specifically,_ and _you’ve put time into researching contemporary ethics and morality for… some reason_.”

 _“It’s interesting to see a new perspective_ ,” Syn says, which is… certainly part of it. It’s a big part of it.

(It’s also that she saw morals at the end of every episode of children’s shows she watched, lessons about nature and the inherent goodness of humanity and love for the world in every princess movie, tales where good triumphs over evil and just… got curious. She’s a monster. She’s a Heterodyne. She will never be _less_. But perhaps she can be more.)

(She is a Heterodyne. She lives to surprise.)

 _“You broke someone’s nose because they called me aspie_ ,” Remy says. It’s a quieter line than most of what he’s said. More thoughtful. _“So I’m pretty sure you do care about me enough that what happened before doesn’t matter.”_

 _“Forgiven for sneaking into your lab, breaking your king’s heart, and doing my level best to destroy your coalition for the sake of my town and family?”_ Syn asks, her tone deceptively light.

Remy looks uncomfortable, but he shrugs. _“You’re a better person now, I think, and… well. I count as family, don’t I?”_

Syn smiles at him, and something tight in her chest loosens. Yeah. Yeah, he’s family. Little cousin Remy. The one that’s like her, now in more ways than one.

She sips on her juice pack, swallows, and asks, in English this time, “So what do we do now? Are you going to go around trying to thwart me?”

Remy raises an eyebrow. It looks kind of funny, considering he’s, well, _eight_. “Are you going to do anything that requires thwarting?”

Syn shrugs. “I don’t know yet. Probably not for a while. There’s still so much to learn, and anything I’d be tempted to do that requires thwarting would probably be thwarted by something else, first. Like ethics boards that manage research grants.”

Remy snorts out a laugh, his face falling onto his hands as he giggles. It’s cute. Syn wants to ruffle his hair.

So she does.

He pops up to glare at her, which isn’t really doing much since he can’t fight down the smile, and he’s still got a baby face. “You do realize I died at over twice the age you lived to reach, right? I’m older than you.”

“You’re shorter and legally I’m your older cousin, so I don’t care,” Syn tells him. She leans forward to ruffle his hair again. “Besides, who else is going to fight the bullies for you?”

“They are _literal_ children, Euphrosynia,” he says. “I’m fairly certain I can handle it.”

“Don’t care!” Syn sing-songs. “I’m gonna throw hands anyway.”

“You’re irritating,” he informs her. “Even more so than our first lives.”

“I don’t really care,” Syn says, slipping around the table to hug him from the side. He lets her, even leans into it a little. “Hm. How did you figure it out, anyway?”

“You swear like a Mechanicsburger and call yourself Syn, even though Aunt Steliana hates it, you’re obsessed with science in a way that _does_ fit with the autism, but even more with the Spark, and you’re more stubborn than anyone I’ve ever met save for the rest of the Heterodynes,” he says. “It wasn’t hard.”

“That’s… fair,” Syn admits. It really is. “You hid better.”

“You didn’t even remember my name, so _that_ wasn’t hard either.”

She gives him a noogie for that, a wide grin on her face as he yelps and shouts at her for it, wriggling ineffectually instead of actually trying to get out of it.

It’s what older cousins are for, right?

They end up leaning up against each other on the couch, sharing a blanket, and watching the History channel. There’s a documentary about King Louis XIV on, and the two of them have _more_ than enough to say about the costumes, the battle strategies, and most of all, the _hair._

The lack of sparks, they’re used to, but _the hair._

When Aunt Ilse comes home, it’s to find the two of them asleep together on the living room floor, surrounded by papers covered in diagrams and formulas and a few sketches of people and places they’d known, once.

It’s nice to have someone that understands.


	6. Synchronization

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gallop swiftly on to another stage of life.

Syn knows her mother is curious about what she and Remy are saying at all hours, but she’s not exactly about to tell.

Nobody else would understand. Her father thinks they’re just talking nonsense, and Aunt Ilse thinks it’s a prototype of a conlang. Marie is too busy making sure the twins and little Hannah are okay to really even notice it’s not a real language.

But Steliana Fitzgerald notices, because 1600s Mech is complicated and old and different from modern Romanian, too far to be mutually intelligible in any sense, but there are enough similarities that Steliana almost definitely notices.

She doesn’t say anything, though, and Syn and Remy are content with that.

“Pass the screwdriver,” Syn says, and one lands in her hand. She fiddles with a few screws, tightening a loose panel, and sits back. “Done!”

“That looks… ugly,” Remy decides. Syn elbows him in the ribs. “It does!”

“Just because you made the Muses all look like sexy little minxes does not mean my robots need to look like pretty girls,” Syn sniffs.

“Did you just call my life’s work—”

“You made them sexy ladies and we both know it!” Syn interrupts. She sticks out her tongue at him, and he makes a sort of… harrumphing noise, and Syn decides that this clearly means that she needs to put him a headlock and give him a noogie.

So she does.

He wriggles out, of course, because he can’t fight, but he can squirm his way out of just about anything unless Syn is actually trying to hurt him. She never is, so he always gets out after a few seconds.

“You are the _actual worst_ ,” Remy whines.

“Yes, well, Heterodyne Princess,” Syn preens as he rolls his eyes. She brightens. “Actually, on that note, guess what I’m doing for Halloween!”

Remy points at the robot. “Aren’t we going to—”

 _“Guess._ ”

Remy takes a deep breath, clearly tired of her shit. “Dressing up as your old self?”

“Well, we’re _saying_ warrior princess, but yeah, it’s totally one of my old outfits,” Syn says proudly. “Now let’s test the robot.”

“Oh good, because the Halloween thing was _such_ an important reason to delay.”

“You’re being a Debbie Downer, Remy.”

“I hate you.”

“Nah, you don’t, not really,” Syn said, settling in front of the controls. “You’d have already tried to kill me if you _really_ hated me.”

“I definitely aim to get a life sentence for murdering my cousin as a teenager, yes.”

Syn looked at him, smile falling, suddenly uncertain. Before she could say anything, he rolled his eyes and bumped his shoulder into hers.

“I don’t actually hate you, you’re just annoying. Let’s just test the robot.”

“Awesome!”

o.o.o.o.o.

The school’s plans play out perfectly.

Cythia Fitzgerald enters MIT at age fifteen, to the worried pride of her mother and the silent annoyance of her father.


End file.
